


Piecemeal

by BlueColoredDreams



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gap Filler, Gen, Minor Spoilers up to Ep.64, Vegetable Carving, pre-Wonderland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-12 17:40:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11166795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: Taako goes to the kitchens to process, to ponder, and to piece together the parts of him that he feels like he's missing.





	Piecemeal

**Author's Note:**

> All I want is for more Lucretia+crew bonding moments. All I want. That's it. So I gave Taako some bonding time with her because why should Merle have all the fun with retrospectively depressing bonding?  
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Taako first takes notice of the vegetable carvings after they secured the Stone. If he thinks back, he vaguely remembers seeing them before—in the days after they’d joined, after the races in Goldcliff. But he’d never paid them much mind; it isn’t as if the other members of the Bureau point them out. The carvings show up, they get eaten, and then they’re gone. No one says anything, they just seem to accept that sometimes elaborate peacocks of watermelon show up on the breakfast bar, so he simply follows suit. They're on a moon base, for fuck’s sake—there are much stranger things than edible centerpieces to occupy his mind.

Until now. Now it bothers him.

Maybe it was because he’d picked up his own old habits again for Candlenights. Maybe it was just because he’s the only person in the cafeteria and can see just how extensive each piece really is. 

Whatever the case, he sees them, honestly and truly sees them, and can inspect them thoroughly before the horde comes through and devours it all: The intricately carved and delicately arranged platters of carved fruits and vegetables. Roses made from cucumbers and daffodils of mangoes. Strawberries cut into bouquets nestled onto the plates of waffles and pancakes, hand dusted with sugar.

This isn’t the work of some bored guard on KP duty. This was done by someone who viewed food as an art, who had an attention to detail to be admired, someone who was _skilled_. Someone took hours upon hours to do all of this.

He finds that he’s intrigued in ways he very rarely is these days. But when he asks, no one has an answer for him.

“They show up every time we lose an agent,” Killian says gruffly, shrugging. “Not surprising they’ve popped up considering…”

Everyone around them nods solemnly. He, Merle, and Magnus trade looks, and he can’t help but roll his eyes to the ceiling—none of them consider either of them too much of a loss, Boyland or Lucas (who all three of them knew was very much alive and somewhat well), but obviously  _someone_ in the Bureau did.

He lets the matter drop because he doesn’t feel like asking around anymore than he already has and doesn’t want to hurt his cool-guy front.

Also, he forgets: The bouquets and intricate arrangements of watermelon peacocks and Escher-esque apples disappear from the mealtime offerings the very next day, and it slips from his mind.

He forgets, like he’s prone to doing, because he’s occupied with other, more present things. Training, intel meetings with the rest of the team (which is mostly the Director sighing at them and Merle making terrible jokes, and he hates that he finds it all amusing, hates that he gets  _bored_ when the message spell comes, like it often does: _No new information, no meeting, please enjoy your free time, boys_ ), magic lessons with the kid (something else that he hates that he’s fond of, hates that somehow the Director has found out and has started scheduling it on the weekly timetables that get distributed amongst all the teams), and getting his ass handed to him by Killian and Noelle while Carey and Magnus go off and train and Merle cackles from the sidelines.

And then... well, then, they go to Refuge.

He’s felt, for a while, that something is missing. That there is something large and intangible that he is missing that his mind trips and slides over, that he can’t put his finger on.

He’s always chalked it up to a product of his relatively degenerate lifestyle and his strange upbringing, to the gaping hole that was his life when he had to make the necessary switch from being the company cook to the resident wizard. To the fact that he alone is the only person he can put his trust in, to the towns and lives he quietly slipped away from in the night, to the forty people who trusted  _him_  and died because of it. He feels the edges of the hole inside of him, and he ignores it and moves forward.

He doesn't look back, because that is useless waste of time. And who _doesn’t_ feel like something is missing? Isn’t that the point of all of it? To live and experience and move forward to find whatever it was that made it all worthwhile, whatever that thing may be? And isn’t he just out to have fun anyway? So why does it even matter?

But after Refuge, after the Chalice, he feels it more than ever. It’s inexplicable, because for all intents and purposes, he should feel  _whole_ again. He is _absolved_.

But he’s just as empty as he was before.

He knows it and was faced with it in the mines of Refuge:

His guilt wore a bright yellow dress, looked him in the eye, and offered him a choice. His guilt sweet talked him and swept him through all those years, all that time he’d refused to look at in the effort to ignore it all, and his guilt faced him with all the deaths on his hands. Glamour Springs. Phandalin.

He is not sentimental. He does not dwell.

But  _god_ :

He can’t pretend that for a second, some brief, wild, feverish moment, he thought he’d take it.

But he knew better. He’s not sure what it was, but that conviction was like a whisper in his ear that told him he was  _better_ than that, to fall for the sales pitch like some poor schmuck. It told him to keep walking forward, reminding him of all those years he survived solely because he did not look back. Ignore the ache, something in him said, move forward.

Better to be empty of your own accord than to take an empty promise. And that Chalice was nothing but an empty promise, a treatment for the result but not the cause. He’s in the best place he could be, in the best place to keep on towards the road ahead. On the road he’s on now, he at least has a _chance_. The Chalice promised him a shining career, a life without guilt, but that was just as hollow as the cup itself—not one person here at the Bureau has promised him jack shit other than money and trouble and a roof over his head, and that means more to him than anything else.

He’s still not entirely sure how hard it was for the others, but he knows Magnus—well, Magnus hasn’t been the same since Refuge. He hears him at night, shuffling around in his bedchambers, muttering to himself in the wee hours of the morning. Taako can tell he’s not sleeping at all; he’s distracted at training and during meetings and he’s distant, now. It… hurts to see. 

It hurts to think of him as a friend, to be worried for someone else. He’s unused to the feeling, of being concerned for someone other than himself, and it troubles him just as much as what the Chalice had shown him.

He lies awake in his room, staring up at the ceiling, unable to quell his thoughts or bear listening to one more uneasy night of Magnus’ pacing. He throws the covers off of himself, slips out of his room, out of their dormitory suite, and down the darkened halls of the Bureau.

He makes his way to the kitchen. The quad and campus are empty save for a few guards, none of whom ask him any questions. They just wave and let him pass, swayed by what he’s done for the Bureau. 

Not for the first time, he thinks that they’re all guileless saps, so easily swayed into trust.

For all the Director raves at them about trust and boundaries, even  _she_  is so stupidly trusting of them all. She’s raised an organization of soft, trusting fools. He wonders for what end she’s done all this for: For what ends has she allowed them to grow so complacent? They’re so obviously her army, handpicked, trained and indoctrinated, fed an agenda of mistrust and caution, and yet she lets them be soft and friendly and so goddamn  _trusting_. 

It makes him angry.

The trust placed in him here makes him angry. Not just because he’s unused to trust like this, but because no one knows him, no one knows what he’s done, what he’s been through. It frustrates him. They just take it at face value here, all of the jokes and suave words, but they’ve been lying to them the whole time. About Lucas, about the Stone and the entirety of what they saw and heard in Refuge, about the Red Robe, all sugar-spun half truths in a whirlwind of confusion, and it would be so, so easy to bring it all down. Even the Director herself has as much sense as a bottle cap, and it infuriates him. 

He knows he’s working himself up, angering himself for no good reason but pure frustration, but how  _dare_ they trust him? How dare the Director allow security to let him even near the kitchens? Did she even bother to look—was she that foolish, that gullible, that she would let them go without investigation in the flush of her first victory? Or was it a trick, to lull him into thinking he had some sort of place here at the Bureau, only to snatch it away?

He throws open the doors to the kitchens in his anger, then goes cold as the doors bang against chrome and glass walls, his gaze meeting the source of his frustration. 

“Well, this is a surprise,” the Director says, looking nonplussed.

Taako is just as startled by this development as she is—so startled, in fact, that the doors swing shut in his face. He splutters, then tosses them open again, holding them in place.

“The fuck are _you_ in here for?”

The Director does the same inward purse of her lips and slow blink that she does when they’re talking in circles during meetings, a tale-tell sign of her frustration. “I would  _imagine_  that I’m in here to  _cook,_ since this, in fact, the  _kitchen_ ,” she says slowly, like she's talking to a toddler. 

“Okay, but why are you here at ass-o-clock in the morning?” Taako shoots back.

She cocks her head to the side, one white eyebrow raised. “Oh, I don’t know— why are  _you_ here at, as you stated, ass-o-clock?”

“Like you said,” he retorts, “It’s a kitchen. I’m here to cook.”

“Likewise,” she says. 

“You cook?” he asks incredulously. “I never got the impression.”

“I didn’t live this long without learning how to feed myself; so obviously, I must have done  _some_  modicum of cooking. But yes, in a sense, I do cook.”

He finds her so out of place here that it’s hard to even piece together the fact that she’s in the kitchen to cook, not to wave her thin finger at him and slap his hands for coming back to the place he swore off years and years ago.

She’s dressed in plain clothes, a guard’s uniform instead of the long robes she usually wears, her coiled bangs held back with a scarf, and thin gold cords hold her sleeves from her forearms. He squints at her, and then the myriad of vegetables spread out before her. There’s a marble cutting board laid out before her, and balanced on it is a cloth roll with several small knives laid out, one by one on the white surface.  The whole scene is so incongruous that it takes him a good ten seconds to put it together. 

And suddenly, it clicks in Taako’s mind.

“You?” he asks, letting the doors swing shut behind him as he steps towards the island the Director has set herself up at. “ _You’re_  who makes all the carvings?”

She bristles at him, shoulders drawn back and chest expanding, mouth pursed into a flat line of defensive anger for a brief second. And then she deflates, shoulders slumping and breath leaving her in a heavy exhale. She crosses her arms across her chest and looks away from him. She looks small, defeated, like this is a secret he's prying from her like a tooth hanging onto its roots. 

“I hadn’t realized it was a matter of… intrigue,” she mutters.

“I mean, sort of. I was interested because, I… well. I cook,” he says. “Professionally—or, I used to. I can appreciate craftsmanship when I see it.”

“Well, thank you,” she says softly, giving him a look that makes him want to make sure he’s fully dressed or that there’s not some strange magical creature attached to his neck.

Taako wonders for a second if she knows about Glamour Springs at all. With the look she’s giving him, she must, right? Or maybe it’s the thought of him doing something other than fucking around with his life, of him doing something professionally enough that he can appreciate it openly.

He realizes that he must be looking at her just as strangely. He’d never thought of the Director as a person, really. She was a human being, yes, but she’s his boss and she’s so distant and stoic that it’s hard to think of her as a person with a life and interests other than scolding them behind her desk or in the dojo or running the Bureau.

He thinks of her dry sarcasm and the interest she’d shown him during the Candlenights’ party, and is surprised to feel a twinge of guilt for ignoring her all this time. For all the physical size of the Bureau, he knows it’s small resource-wise, and that most of the members are exceedingly close, and obviously the Director is part of that community in whatever manner she’s able to be involved.

_They show up when we’ve lost an agent_ , he remembers Killian saying.

The Director grieves here in the kitchens, sunk into intricate carvings and thin knives. She comes in the dead of night to grieve and process, something she must not have the freedom to do elsewhere. He thinks of how composed she is when she reads off the names of lost agents, sends them floating up to the Voidfish, how she always shows up to do her part, even when she must be devastated.

The look she’s giving him is one of the same realization, that they are both whole people who exist outside of the confines of the Bureau and the roles they’ve taken up in its domes and hallways. She had a life before the Bureau, just like he did, and strangely enough, their lives both involved cooking. 

He feels a connection, then, a bond that he can’t describe in words, but can almost see, a silver thread like his spell lifelines. They are the same, she and he: skittish, proud, and private.

“I can come back another time,” he says.

She shakes her head and unfolds her arms. “Don’t leave on my account, Taako,” she says.  She gestures with an elegant hand; “These are your facilities as well.”

“Oh, well, a’ight,” he answers, a bit caught off guard. He half wanted her to send him away. 

She says nothing else, simply picking up one of her carving knives and a carrot. He watches for a moment before shrugging, sauntering off to survey the contents of the kitchen cabinets and inset iceboxes.

He pulls down a few bowls, a few whisks, and the various utensils he knows he’d need, and then begins to pull out ingredients, going solely on memory. He gets to the point that he needs to start measuring out and mixing before he freezes, the sight of the town of Glamour Springs fresh in his mind.

_It wasn’t me_ , he reproaches. _For fuck’s sake._

But still, he freezes. He freezes like he did six years ago, the first night after. He freezes like he did for months and months and months later, eating shitty tavern food that he could have whipped up in his sleep with his hands bound behind his back because he can't bear to pick the ingredients up anymore. He freezes like he did a year to the day later, throwing up onto someone’s shoes because the pub got his order wrong and sent him a meal with garlic and he couldn't bear it. He freezes like he does every time he tries to think about it seriously, when he tries to look back and face it. 

He didn’t have this problem during Candlenights, when he was caught up in the fun and joy of it. And he’s been able to fuck around in their private kitchens, no one has gotten sick from that, no one has died or anything. He’s even given the kid food, for fuck’s sake. He’s even given the Director food. He’s kept himself, Merle, and Magnus fed-ish during missions.

And like, he’s ninety percent sure Angus was fucking with him about the height thing. So why can’t he do it now?

But this is an industrial kitchen. This is the kitchen that feeds the Bureau. These are the ingredients that go out to his coworkers and his friends and the guards. All those people who he knows by face, if not by name. 

All those people. All those people whose names he didn’t bother to know, but whose faces kept him up all those nights.

It took so long to get his composure back after that; it took so long to get it right again, to go back to not caring. To build it all back up to the point that he didn't constantly think about it, that he could easily schmooze with people and have them recognize him without that white-hot bolt of panic. To build up the easy front, the slick, unconcerned facade. And all of it had been ripped away by a goddamn cup. 

All of it, ruined, by a goddamn cup that made him face the facts.

June as the Chalice, aged beyond her years, in the yellow dress, cup extended. The scent of elderberries and garlic. Knowing it wasn’t him, but still freezing up because he’s lived with that conviction for  _so long_. And he’s scared. What could follow him up here, on the damn moon? But he’s still frozen in place, stuck in that one moment.

It was easier, almost, to think that it was just his fault alone.

He slams down the stick of butter he was about to toss into the mixer, disgusted with himself. He turns his back to the counter and walks towards the Director.

“Who taught you to carve?” he asks.

He’s not interested, really, but he needs the distraction that the information would provide. He feels antsy, unease and frustration crawling underneath his skin. He drapes himself against the edge of her island, fingers fluttering against the marble as he watches her hands move. “You don’t just pick this shit up.” 

She looks up at him from the intricate fern carving she was doing on the back of an apple slice. There’s something uneasy in her face in the silence.

“I… they—she, well…I,” the Director says uncertainly. She inhales, and then sighs once before setting down her tools. She blinks down at her work, brows pinched in something unreadable.

Taako has the desire to reach over and pluck the fern-carved apple from the cutting board, to put it in his mouth, just to see what the Director would do.

Maybe she’d kick him out; maybe if she kicked him out, he wouldn’t have to face the feeling like ice in his gut. Maybe he wouldn’t have to acknowledge the brief second of raw, wild grief he’d seen on her face.

He reaches over and grabs it. It’s sweet and firm against his tongue, bursting with juice as he bites down on it so slowly that she has to look up at him, has to take notice. He’s doing it simply to be a bother, and he makes it known in the way he leans against the counter, in how he chews.

But the Director simply looks amused, like she’d been waiting for him to steal her hard work and eat it. He supposes he’s not quite as devious as he thinks he is if she was expecting it; that or she’s so used to him fucking around that she doesn’t react anymore. Either way, he has to up his game.

He grabs another slice, and waves it at her. “Well?” he prompts, pointing it at her.

“Someone I loved dearly taught me to do it,” she says, like his goofing has freed the information from the back of her mouth.

Taako tips his head up in interest. She picks up the apple she’d cut the pieces from and tosses it to him easily, her lips curving into something guarded and small, much like the portrait in her office. It looks like she has a secret; she must have been something sly when she was young.

He’s not as surprised by this thought as he would have thought he’d be.

It feels like something clicking into place in the back of his mind, like the words to a song he’d not heard since he was young. It almost feels like she’s given him a small piece of what he was missing.

Maybe it’s not the Director herself that was part of what was missing, but the memory she’s providing him: The memory of picking up carving as a piece of showmanship, something to flourish with the magic and the charming words and prestidigitation to keep people coming back to him. Just one more thing he could whip out of his sleeve when times got rough to keep it all moving forward. The bandaged fingers and lopsided roses, frustration at the small details that would escape him, of being so absorbed in learning that it would be dawn before he realized. 

“I kept following her into the galley, and one day she told me I had to do something useful if I was going to take up space,” the Director says blithely. “Though I think the term useful was inherently debatable. It was just to give me something to do, really.”

“Galley? You served on a ship?” Taako asks, twisting the stem of the apple between his fingers.

She looks momentarily perturbed by his question. He figures she thought he would latch onto the other kernel of personal information, but he thoroughly doesn’t care about her personal predilections. The galley, though, it's interesting. 

Her fingers flutter, and she reaches up to touch the Stone of Farspeech around her neck. “Well,” she says slowly, “It… Was a long time ago.”

He recognizes the dismissal as what it is, and nods, biting into the apple.  He decides to push his luck despite her deflection. “Whatever happened to your ship, then? And your friend?” he asks around a mouthful of apple. 

The Director scowls at him and picks up another apple and her carving knife.

“The  _Grand Relics_  happened, Taako,” she reprimands. Her voice is flat once more, face closed off and expressionless.  

He nods, and they are silent for the rest of the night. He eats her apples as indiscriminately as he can, just to see if she’d do anything.

She doesn’t.

It isn’t until he leaves her behind in the dark hallways that he realizes that he probably hurt her quite badly with his careless question. He’s startled to find that he cares. 

But if he did hurt her, the Director gives no indication of it when she shows up while they’re fucking around in the regulator’s dojo the next afternoon. 

She shows up and simply watches, like she does sometimes.

She stands on the sidelines, her hands folded over the grain of her staff and face impassive as her eyes take in each move, every pulled punch and feint, each spell that gets thrown out. She’s straight-backed and stately as always, the long silken folds of her blue and gold robes out of place among the rest of them, sweaty and clothed in the spun cloth practice robes provided by the Bureau.

She watches for a good hour in silence before she taps her staff against the marble pathway that rings the main platform. The sound is just as cutting as it always is, just as striking as her regal figure. They halt their training, turning to face her like soldiers falling into rank.

“I shall be joining you from now on,” she says plainly, unhooking the clasp of her robes from her throat. She brushes the fabric off of her shoulders, silk cascading down around her to pool on the ground around her feet, revealing the same plain guard’s uniform that she’d worn the night before.

“Oh  _hell yeah_ ,” Killian says under her breath.

“Shit,” Carey laughs, obviously delighted. “Shit!”

“Are we—are we in trouble?” Merle mutters under his breath.

Magnus shrugs, eyeing the Director warily. “This isn’t normal, right?” he asks Carey, who shakes her head as she grins and hunkers down.

Taako leans on the Umbra Staff, lips pursed as he watches the crowd that gathers behind the Director, their faces alight with a hungry sort of joy that he thinks doesn’t quite bode well for them.

The Director steps up onto the wooden platform, seemingly unaware of the pressure building and buzzing around them as more and more Regulators stop their own training to flock forward to their area, soon joined by the nearby groups of Seekers. Even the guards that trail behind her are watching, absolutely rapt.

She holds her staff loosely, her face impassive as she surveys them.

“You’re lacking, boys,” she says flatly.

“Now see here,” Merle starts up, as Magnus cuts over him with an “Oh, yeah? Like you could—”

Taako manages to move before Merle and Magnus do, seeing the way that both Carey and Killian tense up the second the Director does that cock of her head that he hates so goddamn much, but he barely even has the time to open up the Staff before he’s blasted off of his feet.

He didn’t even see her move in the flash of light she produced, but there she is, knees slightly bent and arms straight out, her staff braced in both hands and still glowing with the spell that blew them all off their feet.

“Too slow. We have to fix that,” she says simply. She stands straight and takes another deliberate step forward. She flips her staff between her palms again, quick as lightening, so that it rests upright in her grasp. “The six of you—yes, you too, Noelle; come on up if you please—try to break the barrier. See if you can strike me.”

And thus starts their training from hell. 

* * *

He would think, after being put through a training montage from the pits of hell itself, that he would be able to calm his mind enough to meditate for the night. Instead, his aches and pains from being blasted and slung back into the air multiple times and the sound of Magnus in the next room doing—something, he hopes it’s carpentry, _he swears to god_ —keep him awake.

He hears her voice, calm and dry,  _You’re lacking_.

Well, he knows that.

He’s just not sure what it  _is_ he’s lacking, but he knows that it’s not his physical skills that rankle him. It’s the cucumber roses on his salad at lunch, it’s the garlic sauce from dinner, and it was the Director laughing at him and tossing him an apple when he’s doing nothing but needling her to ignore his own issues. It’s the memory of presenting plates with fantastically carved fruits to his caravan, it’s the memory of thin blades in his fingers at night, and it’s wondering who the Director is grieving for now. It’s the look on Angus’ face, a battle between hero-worshiping delight and consternation, when he hears Killian tell him about the Director showing up at training and handing them all their asses without taking a single blow.  

_You’re lacking_.

He knows he’s lacking. He’s been lacking for a long time. Family, friends, homes, morals. He walked in this place without shit to his name.

And the Bureau, what is it to him? A family? Friends? A home? A code of ethics to follow? Bullshit.

Sometimes the bracer on his wrist feels like a shackle, and he wonders if that’s what she intended it to be.

His hands ache for something to do. His mind races, longing for something familiar that he can do without thought. He rolls out of bed and heads towards the kitchens again.

This time, he’s not surprised when he finds the Director in them, trays and trays of vegetables already spread out behind her. She's four peacocks and a phoenix in already. 

“Tell me,” the Director says without preamble. “Are you here to eat all of my apples again, or are you here to cook?”

“ _Hmph_.”

“Mmhmm, that tells me a lot,” she drones, not bothering to look at him as she cores a cucumber.

“I’m going to make some dope-ass shit that’s going to put your fuckin’ apples _to shame_ ,” he snaps.

“Yes, sure, you go on ahead,” she says.

He pulls pans from the cupboards as loudly as he can, slamming them on the counter. His hands start to shake midway through gathering materials.

_It wasn’t me, get over it, it wasn’t me_. _Get over it! It wasn’t me that did it, I did not poison them, it wasn’t my cooking that did it—_

The weathered hands and yellow dress and the shining cup. He hears her just like she’s in the room with him, and not a memory.

_They died all the same, and you fed them their deaths_.

A metal ring of measuring spoons fall from his shaking fingers and clatter to the floor. 

“Taako.”

He whirls around, heart pounding and mouth bitter at the sound of his name. The Director is looking at him, her face soft with pity and it makes him feel sick. He wants to pick up a pan and throw it at her, see if he can break that cold demeanor in the ways he couldn't at practice, slam a mixing bowl over her head and make her stop looking at him like that, like he’s something small and broken. 

The look tells him all that he needs to know.

The Director knows.

Knows about Glamour Springs and the people who died—she probably knows each one of them by name. He wonders if she knows it wasn’t him. Wonders if he should clarify, wonders if it even matters, because she knows and she’s let him in here all the same. She’s encouraged him to cook, even. 

She allowed him in the kitchens despite Glamour Springs. Ate the food he offered her. Allowed him among her personnel and her attendants. She knew, but she never said a thing about it.

He looks at her, knowing he must look so vulnerable in that moment, that he’s shaking and pale and agape. She sets down her carving tools and turns in her seat to face him, her fingers folding together in her lap.

“You don’t actually have to cook when you come here,” she says. “If I have pushed you into something uncomfortable, I apologize. You’re free to simply sit, if you’d like.”

He looks at her, and finds himself moving without thinking. He swings his legs over a chair, leaning on the back of it as he looks at her, hands and face cold despite his neck being hot.

“Here,” she says, handing him a knife, blade pointed towards herself.

He takes it, and it feels like another piece of himself has been given to him.

She doesn’t say anything else to him, doesn’t push him into anything. She just lets him sit in the silence, lets him be there without pretense or reason. 

He carves tray after tray of apples, delicate slices that he arranges in the parchment cups that the Director gives him, and when they show up at breakfast the next morning, coated in cinnamon and butter and baked to a perfect toasted brown, he barely thinks about Glamour Springs at all.

It is a small piece of himself that's been given back to him, but it's immeasurably important. 

* * *

They fall into a pattern after that:

The Director kicks their asses day after day after day in the dojo, lambastes their lack of progress. The Regulators step up and she hands them  _their_ asses too. It’s a veritable buffet of ass-kicking, served hot and fresh each day by the Director, who barely ever breaks a sweat. No one has managed to break the barrier she puts up around herself. Only her guards ever see action, knocking each one of them to the ground time after time when she’s decided that absolutely decimating them was too boring for her, or whatever.

They’re the only ones frustrated by it, though. Apparently, it’s a well-known fact that the Director has always been untouchable in a fight. Killian and Carey and Avi, and now even Noelle, enjoy it each day, laughing and grinning and throwing themselves at her in a wild joy that Taako just can't understand.

He's not a barbarian. 

“Killian says you walked into a warzone with just your staff and extracted her yourself,” Taako says. “No armor.”

The Director sighs and continues to lay thinly sliced circles of carrots onto a towel. “There was a time where I hand-picked recruits, yes.”

This is the other part of the pattern—after a frustrating day of training, Taako finds himself drawn to the kitchens each night. Without fail, he finds the Director absorbed in her vegetables. It’s the fifth night in a row he’s come down to find her.

Tonight, she’s making endless bouquets of roses in shades of green and orange and red to surround a dragon pieced together from carrots, radishes, and some sort of squash.

“She’s not bullshitting us?”

“No,” the Director answers. “I hadn’t planned on being in danger on that particular trip. But I saw what happened, and I couldn’t not help. And in any case, if Killian has... well if she’s given the story any embellishments, doesn’t that just work to my favor?”

Taako whistles. He continues to whip his meringue mixture, balancing the bowl between his hip and the crook of his elbow.

“Tell me this, Director: is the training rigged?” he asks.

She raises an eyebrow up at him, looking deeply amused. “Do  _you_  think it’s rigged, Taako?”

“Fuck yeah I do,” he answers, lifting the whisk slightly to see if it’s started to set yet. It drips off of the metal, and he sets back to work.

“There’s always a solution, even in a rigged game,” she answers, mouth curving up into a satisfied grin. “And, Taako, you may call me Lucretia. But only,” she says, raising a finger, “If I get first dibs on those macarons.”

He laughs and shakes his head, “Your funeral, lady." 

It’s almost worth the indignant look on her face. Almost. But not quite.

* * *

It’s the tenth night since he’d first stumbled into the kitchens. He’s made up berry muffins for the breakfast offerings, and Lucretia had gracefully provided him with more than enough strawberry roses to garnish each one. She’s moved on to making a mixed fruit bowl out of a watermelon.

“Why are you doing it all by hand?”

Lucretia looks up at him, eyebrows raised. “I have my reasons,” she says simply.

They’ve gotten a bit friendlier since the first night, but she still locks up when he asks her overly personal questions.

He can’t blame her at all, not really. He walked out a few nights previously when she’d accidentally brushed too close to the real heart of his problems in the kitchen. They play this game so easily, tossing questions back and forth, but closing up like violets in the dark when it their game gets a little  _too_  close to something that hurts them. 

“Okay,  _but_ … you could do all of it by magic,” he says. “Speed up the process, save your hands some trouble.”

Lucretia purses her lips and pushes a skewer through the heart of an apple floret. “It’s because it’s more meaningful to me this way: I do it by hand because I do everything else by magic,” she answers. “I missed the feeling of using my hands for something other than work.”

“You could pick up a date for that.”

“Har  _har_ ,” she drones, face flat.

Taako snickers at his own joke, placing a strawberry rose delicately on a muffin.

“You could be doing it all by magic, as well,” Lucretia says softly.

“I have my reasons,” Taako repeats. 

It’s the closest to admitting his guilt that he’s ever done to another human being.

He knows now that it wasn’t his fault, but to spend nearly a decade afraid of something—that sort of guilt is hard to shake. He’s doing better than he’d been doing. Working like this, without judgment and without reproach—even on the night he dumped the entire tray of cookies into the trash can because he couldn’t stomach the idea of anyone eating them, especially not her—it’s done a lot for him. It’s helped him work to the heart of why Refuge and the Chalice unsettled him so badly.

“Taako,” Lucretia says, “Despite how ramshackle this place might seem at times, I want you to know that I  _do_  thoroughly investigate every initiate that walks through these halls. I looked into Glamour Springs.”

“I know you did,” Taako says. “Not for a long time, but the other night, when you looked at me. It was impossible to not know then.”

She nods and continues to work on the vine design on the side of the watermelon she cradles between her elbows.

“You never brought it up,” he accuses.

Lucretia turns the melon slowly, scraping a curling leaf against its rind. “It was not relevant to the job you were entrusted with,” she answers.

There’s a long moment of silence before she continues on: “Also, the symptoms of poisoning by arsenic are very memorable, and require much smaller dosages to induce. The amount of belladonna required to induce a poisoning event with a hundred percent fatality rate is… Well, a lot more than what would be considered a garnish, even if you were generous.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah. I realized that a couple of months after, but… the _magic_ , I thought…I was so convinced it was _me_. My bad, right?”

“ _Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa_ ,” she whispers.

“Yeah, that shit,” he says, giving a shaky laugh.

Lucretia sets down her tools and looks at him. He feels like he’s being cracked open like a book by her gaze—it’s just as steady and intent as June’s was, like she’s expecting him to do something that will change the whole world. Like she’s waiting for him to make a choice. 

But what choice does she want from him? What could he do, here, for her, that could change the whole world? 

“It’s a hard weight to bear, death,” she says simply. “And we all need a chance to be forgiven for the sins we’ve committed.”

“Who did  _you_  kill, then?” Taako asks her. He expects her to shut him down.

She surprises him by answering:

“The people I loved.”

“The woman who taught you to carve?”

“Yes,” she says. She looks at the melon between her hands and sighs. “It might not have been my hands that ended her life, but my actions did. I ended several lives with my actions, all at once. And I will live with that, always. I will never be forgiven, and that is what I have accepted. I would not change it, but I know that I must work towards a future where it can’t happen ever again.”

“The Chalice,” Taako says, spurred to honesty by Lucretia’s surprising candidness. “It offered me a chance to turn it back. To take it back. It showed me… It wasn’t me that did it. But I was still  _responsible_ , and all the relief I felt at it not being me… That it wasn’t me who poisoned them all… after that joy and relief faded, I realized that it was still my fault. I could have taken the cup, and people _still_ would have died because of me. It just wouldn’t have been the people in Glamour Springs. Maybe some other town, maybe some other show with more than forty people. Maybe in a world where Glamour Springs didn’t happen, I would eat it too, and I would die, along with whoever got caught in the crossfire. And that fucking _terrified_ me. Glamour Springs could have been saved, but… what I did that made it happen wasn’t what the Chalice offered me. The worst moment of my life was just the result of my own shit judgment and terrible personality. And I don’t know which is easier to swallow, that, or the story I’d bought into that it was my fault alone.”

“I know this is the best place and time for me to be, just because of that. Just because the Chalice was dumb enough to offer me a solution to a symptom, not the actual root of the problem. If I’d taken it, it would just have happened again and again and I’d keep fucking suffering until I died from it. But _dammit_.”  

Lucretia nods, folding her fingers together. “Often, we lose sight of the smaller things we do until they cause an action that is so large that it cannot be undone,” she says. “And all we can do in the aftermath is try to make up for it, try not to do it again. I know what _I_ have done to stop further damage by my actions.”

“What have _you_ done, Taako, to prevent another Glamour Springs? Because I think you’ll find the answer is more than you think you have.”

He pushes a muffin across the table to her.

She takes it and looks him in the eye as she bites into it, and all the pieces feel like they’ve fallen into place for him.

“I’d like to host lessons, here,” he says. “At the Bureau. Cooking. Magic. All of it. Maybe carving, if you’d be down. Not now, not even soon. Just… one day. When it’s all over. Eventually.”

“I think you’d find a rapt and willing audience,” she says, wiping a bit of muffin from her lip. And she grins at him, something young and bright and absolutely delighted. 

And He… he feels like he’s lived this moment before: 

He’s done this before, this scene, where he’s standing across from Lucretia, pastries and vegetables surrounding them, light playing off of chrome and glass. He feels like he’s been stretched and pressed between the planes of a window, his head light as he watches her eat the muffin with an inelegant pleasure that comes from good food and hunger. He closes his eyes and he can almost  _see_ it, silver threads and this same scene, dark skin and light hair and the cautious delight she exudes.

He feels the ache of something missing, suddenly and sharply, like a knife between his ribs. It takes his breath and his mind and it shakes him to his core. There’s a moment of realization, of knowing that what’s missing is not a some _thing,_  but a presence, some _one_ he should know.

Something and someone, something tied intrinsically to Lucretia, to this scene that he feels like he has lived before in the kitchen, laughing with her, like there should be _more_ than just them. He trips and slides over the revelation like ice, and it makes his teeth feel fuzzy and his body ache like he's hit his funny bone, tingling and tight and full of…  _static…_

“Who taught you to carve?” he asks quickly, before the urge to ask leaves him like he fears it will. It’s important. It’s tied to this feeling. It’s tied to his cooking, his conviction to move forward, it’s tied tightly to all of it and it’s important. “The one from your ship.  _Tell me her name_.”

Lucretia says something— he hears it, and it sounds like a sob when she says the name, and for a second he feels complete, the déjà vu relieved and the pieces slotted back into him with the scent of fresh fruit and baking bread and vegetables carved for fun, for busy work, and something nearer, the feeling of his staff jerking in his hands, but his mind slides away from it just as quickly as it touches on it. He can't even remember asking the question anymore. 

“Who have you been grieving for, then?” he asks.

“My friends,” Lucretia answers, and when he opens his eyes to look at her, he’s surprised to see that her cheeks are damp and her fingers are over her mouth, shaking.

* * *

She stops talking to him after that night, stopped showing up to the kitchens after that, and she trains them to the point that they almost resent her.

But he remembers her saying the game was rigged and he starts to look for ways around it. And when he shatters her barrier after weeks of looking for the loophole, she beams up at him. It’s something fiercely proud and ecstatic, even as she brings her staff flat against his gut and sends him hurtling back into the wall with a force that has him tasting blood.

Weeks later, she pushes the flyer for Wonderland across her desk, sounding weary and old and Taako is furious to realize that she doesn’t expect them back, doesn’t expect them to live and all that time, she’d been mourning them in advance and he’s  _pissed_. She’d been holding their vigil while he was in the kitchen with her, and he's  _so goddamn_ _pissed._

And despite it all, he’s supposed to believe she’s betrayed them, misled them all, and it doesn’t feel right, but it all lines up but the lines don’t lead exactly where he thought they would. 

And then, she says Lup’s name and he remembers, remembers the night in the kitchen, and realizes she’d been grieving for them not just because she thought she was going to lose them to Wonderland, but also because she knew the time was coming that she would lose them permanently. The ichor is as bitter in his mouth as the old memories are, but he remembers. 

He remembers all the things she took from them, remembers that all those nights he felt empty was because something  _had_ been taken from him.

But he also remembers the tears on Lucretia’s face and remembers what she’d said about making up for it, and he remembers helping Lup teach her how to hold the knives when she carved, how to protect her hands, how to soak the pieces so they’d be easy to mold into shape. Remembers Lup grabbing  _his_  hands as a teen, when it was roughest, when he was at his worst, and looking him in the eye and telling him to move forward— because they were better than wallowing, better than their lowest parts. He remembers Lup telling him to move forward no matter what. Telling him to learn to let go, let go, let go and be better. Realizing it was her, her all along, that kept him moving even though he couldn’t remember that it was.

He remembers Lup and he remembers the roughness of her name on Lucretia's voice that last night in the kitchen, an anguished plea for forgiveness. Remembers how it all went down, how it all shook out and how messy and painful and bitter it all was in those final moments. Remembers Lucretia saying Lup’s name like she was begging for her own life, and he knows that this entire plane was Lucretia's Glamour Springs. This was her worst moment; this was her guilt and her burden.

And Taako knows what Chalice would offer  _her_ : A time with them all, shining and bright, another stolen century with laughter and love and all of them together, where she didn’t have their blood on her hands. And he knows that she wouldn’t take it either.

Just because he understands doesn’t mean he forgives her, though. But when the dust settles and the anger finally abates, he can at least understand a little about the  _why_ of it all, and sometimes it comforts him more than the anger does. 

**Author's Note:**

> 11/1/17: the end of this bothered me now that balance is over, so I edited just a little to make it sit with canon.


End file.
